Gentlemen,
this has been discussed on the IRC channel a couple of minutes ago, and
i put it for discussion :
As you may have heard our specification was put under severe critizism
from some core developers of the mplayer player for Linux environments.
They were calling our project 'crap' and 'bloated' and us, the
developers and people behind it, are 'stupid DirectShow kiddies' . When
i was pointed to these threads on their mailing list (
http://mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/ ) i completely
overreacted and sent some pretty harsh and unnecessary comments back to
their list. I apologized for that later, and it also turned out as if
they changed their minds a little bit about our project, while still
considering it much to bloated and poweful for a container format.
Recently it became silent about their own container, named 'MPCF' (
MPlayer Container Format ), but now discussion was raised again and they
are starting implementation. In fact, their basic structure seems so
much similar to ours in some points, but simply stripped from all the
more powerful stuff like chapters, menues, etc , i still have to ask
myself where the big need is to make it at all, but this is a free world
and of course they are completely free to do whatever they want to do.
We dont like Xiph people questioning matroska, and so we should question
their goals.
Now, as a result of this it may happen that a certain 'polarisation' may
occur between Linux and Windows users, and this is pretty bad for the
whole opensource movement IMHO. They needed a DirectShow parser to make
sure their container could be played on Windows, and probably would even
find someone doing it for them in the end, but they themselves dont see
this being a necessity. Again, this is very dangerous for the opensource
world IMHO. Until recently everbody was using good old AVI, QT or MP4.
Now we could see a fork between the two worlds, leading to
incompatibility and frustration for the users.
So i was asking myself if we should maybe consider to give them the
'hand of peace' , trying to smooth out the raging waves , for example by
offering them to support their format in our DirectShow parser ?
You may think this is a completely stupid thing to do, but here are my
reasons :
1. Our first and only motivation, in any case, should be the users of
any of the new containers. They dont know about the 'rumbling' behind
the scenes, and they dont deserve to be the victims of that anyway. By
supporting MPCF in our parser we could make their life much easier, by
ensuring the container can be played fine on Windows.
2. By offering help to the mplayer people for the DirectShow playback we
would gain sympathy from some of the MPFC developers ( not all of them
for sure ), but especially from the mplayer/mencoder users. This would
also help a lot to break down 'mental barriers' and to avoid a 'drifting
apart' from Windows and Linux world
3. As a sideeffect we could hopefully convince them to reuse at least a
few of the things we introduce together with matroska, such as our codec
ID list, ( 16 bytes wont hurt them i hope ), the UCI ( or whatever it
will be called ) codec interface, our chapters/control tracks ( their
users surely will request this ) and maybe even our menuing and tagging
system.
@ myFUN, do you think this was feasible, to have our parser handle 2
different formats ? Please note we will NOT want to make this a separate
filter, as we certainly dont want to pay for the hosting of the parser
of another container, and also nobody can ask us to create their parser
filter without some advantage for us. I sincerely hope it should be
possible to implement MPCF playback ( given the really simple structure
they have ) into our parser filter with only a very small file size
increase. Of course, they could always take our sources, strip all the
matroska content of and compile their own filter ... thats the nature of
opensource, and fine with me.
What is your opinion on this ?
Regards
Christian
http://www.matroska.org